Hasn't become more friendly from what I've seen. The project seems largely centered around K8s, and isn't really investing in fixing anything on the "compose" side. I did the same thing as you when Docker first started going down the more commercial path, and after dealing with random breakages for a number of years, fully switched back to Docker (for local dev work on osx).

Podman machine is fine, but occasionally you have to fix things _in the vm_ to get your setup working. Those bugs, along with other breakages during many upgrades, plus slower performance compared to Docker, made me switch back. This is just for local dev with a web app or two and some supporting services in their own containers via compose, nothing special. Totally not worth it IMO.